One of the designers who made it happen

Easy to work with, and responds quickly. Today, almost 3 years after getting our logo designed by Petrol, we are still very happy with the result.

- Martin Wiboe

How Martin Wiboe started their logo design journey

Company name

substans

Overview

We are a bunch of students at the Technical University of Denmark who are teaming up and launching a software development company.
As talented developers who work with both web and desktop applications, we aim to help small business by supplying them with competences that they need to make their latest project succeed.

The name of our company is the danish term "substans", all lower-case, which can be translated as "of important, remarkable content" or "to have significant meaning". This is because our company culture is that of being very ambitious and passionate about software development. One could go so far as to describe us as "elitist" - we exist not because we're big or well-connected, but because we are extremely dedicated to the task at hand and will work hard to complete a given project.
Our image has a "play hard, work hard" attitude, and our employees are in the top 5 % of software students.
Ideally, we appear fresh and a little unconventional but still with an aura of professionalism and trustworthiness.

A large part of our employees are a tad geeky and unusually interested in software, computers and development techniques. These people make sure that we remain at the bleeding edge of technology while striving for perfection with the tools we already possess.

Tell us a bit about who you are and the people you reach

Our customers are small businesses with an uncovered technology need. This is an existing market with a recurring problem: getting an IT project done on time is typically difficult and thus most projects scale back on requirements or go way over time.
Our service consists of providing the raw talent and managing it to deliver on time. We do this by having a transparent development process with a firm structure and frequent status updates.

The typical customer will be in a situation where he does not know how exactly to handle a given problem - he might not have experience with software development in general or the required technology in particular.
Most of all, he is looking for a solution to make sure that a complete solution is found.
We can step in and replace an in-house development team, and it is crucial for our customers to be able to rest assured that we will follow the project until it's done.

In summary, our customers are not very tech-savvy, and they would like a partner on which they can rely to get the job done - be it a simple website or an entire application.

Requirements

We are looking for a logo and typeface to be featured prominently on all company material.

The logo and company name should be placed next to each other, so that we might use them separately if needed. Note that because of this, the name cannot be part of the logo itself.

We discussed what logos we prefer. Software is obviously hard to visualize, so the best bet might be an artistic geometric shape - placed next to an aesthetically pleasing rendition of our name, substans.
We like the following logos:
Zune logo: http://www.zune.net
Windows logo: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/…_v_web.jpg

The whole thing should not feel "generic" so you are welcome to be creative when creating the logo!
Please keep in mind that the result should render reasonably well in grayscale and small sizes.

The typeface should stand out and be clear as well as easily readable.
Using colors to create a fresh impression would definitely be a plus!

We would like the final product in the following formats:
1) 24-bit PNG in a high resolution
2) A common vector format - EPS or whichever suits you.